1. Technical Field
Aspects of this document relate generally to touch sensors, transparent solar cells, and dual mode devices.
2. Background Art
This relates generally to smart devices that require alternative energy to power them for maximum availability and decrease environmental issues that are caused by conventional power generation, alternative to capacitance based touch screens for operational purposes in hygienic environments such as hospitals, and alternative to generating low cost touch sensitive devices for large screen devices like TVs, and other huge display devices.
Today's traditional touch screen devices use capacitance based touch technology, hence it requires an exposed finger or a thin glove to touch the screen directly for capacitance to form, making the touch screen work. However, such requirements cause bacterial growth and infection in sensitive fields such as hospitals. Therefore, such areas require the smart devices to operate using gloves to mitigate the hygienic issues. These capacitance-based touch screens are also expensive to make, especially for large screen devices like TVs and monitors,
The recent novelty of transparent solar cells can be used for alternative energy sources for smart devices, however these transparent solar screens, placed either in between graphical display and touch screen or on top of the touch screen, only provide alternative energy by adding one more layer of complexity to the existing devices. Although this is the case, these transparent solar screens are very cheap to manufacture compared to traditional capacitance based touch screens.
So as to reduce the length and complexity of the detailed description and fully establish the state of the current art, Applicant hereby incorporates the following documents by reference in their entirety:    U.S. Pat. No. 3,482,241 to Aurther et al.    U.S. Pat. No. 3,662,105 to Hurst, et al.    U.S. Pat. No. 7,479,949 to Jobs et al.    U.S. Publication No. 20150199062 to Lang.    U.S. Publication No. 20148730179 to Rosenblatt et al.    Lunt, Richard R., and Vladimir Bulovic. “Transparent Near-infrared Organic Photovoltaic Solar Cells for Window and Energy-scavenging Applications.” Applied Physics Letters 98.11 (2011).